Who was Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a citizen of Geneva who spent most of his adult life in France. For a time he moved in the circle of the Encyclopedists, then fell out with many of them. His first big essays, from 1750 and 1755, said that civilisation had spoiled people's natural goodness and bred unfair inequality. In 1762 he published two books, The Social Contract and Emile, and the Paris authorities condemned both. One described how free people could rule themselves, and the other how to raise a child. His later works included advice to the Poles on their government and the Confessions, and he also took up the study of plants.
Political views
- Said that rightful power comes only from a contract in which citizens join to form a sovereign people, guided by the general will.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Held that the people's sovereignty cannot be handed to representatives, so laws should be passed by the citizens when they assemble.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Blamed private property for the rise of inequality, though he later accepted ownership when it was protected by law.Source: iep.utm.edu
- Wrote that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another, and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself.Source: gutenberg.org
- Called for a civil religion with a few simple beliefs, and said people who rejected it could be exiled as a danger to the community.Source: gutenberg.org
- Doubted that progress in the arts and sciences had made people more virtuous, and concluded it had not.Source: iep.utm.edu
- Gave a founding Legislator the job of drafting a people's basic laws, an idea linked to his concern for civic virtue.Source: plato.stanford.edu
Legacy
The French revolutionaries made Rousseau a hero, and his thinking on popular rule and equality fed democratic, republican and socialist movements. Romantic writers and school reformers borrowed from Emile and his novels. Admirers see a champion of self-government against rank and privilege. Liberal critics say that the general will can be used to force dissenters into line. Mary Wollstonecraft and later feminists objected that his picture of freedom left women out.
In their own words
“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”